By Jane Lee
Two leaves and a bud: That’s the local phrase used for how tea is harvested for market in Kenya. No more, no less, from each stem.
The greater Keroka area in this mountainous rural part of southwestern Kenya in East Africa produces superior tea for domestic use and international export. Enjoyed worldwide, this tea is the main cash crop for local farmers.
This multi-village area in the Kenyan Highlands is the focus for the fund-raising efforts of the nonprofit Hopewell-Keroka Alliance charitable organization, based in Pennington along with its sister organization HKA Keroka, based in Nyanchonori Village. The latter organization manages wide-ranging community-desired health, education and infrastructure-improvement projects on the ground in Kenya.
HKA New Jersey has raised about $170,000 over the past eight years in support of these projects.
It’s all about the tea here: Small family-owned tea farms dot the mountainside of Nyanchonori Village. A tea-buying center—a communitywide tea-collection nexus open for business five days each week, is a hub of activity within this 5,000-resident village. When not in use by local tea farmers, the space, wired for overhead lighting with funds from HKA in recent years, can serve as a community hall and gathering spot, by evening or weekend.
Nyanchonori is the childhood home of HKA co-founder Dr. David Matara Angwenyi, a biology teacher at Hopewell Valley Central High School since 2004. Angwenyi had made his way from Kenya to the United States for college a decade earlier before entering the teaching profession.
Committed to the concept of educational diplomacy, Angwenyi, along with fellow HKA co-founder Dr. Lillian Rankel, then the HVCHS AP chemistry teacher—led the first group of HVCHS students to Nyanchonori in 2007. The following year, inspired by the often-harsh realities of daily life they had witnessed in rural Kenya, Hopewell Valley teachers and residents collaborated to launch the HKA nonprofit, all-volunteer, charitable organization that serves as a cultural bridge between the two communities, American and Kenyan.
More details and more photos from a recent trip by HKA members can be found online at hkalliance.org.
Jane Lee is a HKA board member.
